{"id":33949,"date":"2015-12-16T03:00:28","date_gmt":"2015-12-16T08:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33949"},"modified":"2015-12-15T11:16:55","modified_gmt":"2015-12-15T16:16:55","slug":"chipotle-gains-green-cred-pr-opportunities-and-worse-health-outcomes-for-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/12\/16\/chipotle-gains-green-cred-pr-opportunities-and-worse-health-outcomes-for-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"Chipotle gains “green cred PR opportunities” and<\/em> worse health outcomes for customers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Henry Miller<\/a> on the Faustian bargain Chipotle willingly made and is now paying for:<\/p>\n

Chipotle, the once-popular Mexican restaurant chain, is experiencing a well-deserved downward spiral.<\/p>\n

The company found it could pass off a fast-food menu stacked with high-calorie, sodium-rich options as higher quality and more nutritious because the meals were made with locally grown, genetic engineering-free ingredients. And to set the tone for the kind of New Age-y image the company wanted, Chipotle adopted slogans like, \u201cWe source from farms rather than factories\u201d and, \u201cWith every burrito we roll or bowl we fill, we\u2019re working to cultivate a better world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest of the company wasn\u2019t as swift as the marketing department, however. Last week, about 140 people, all but a handful Boston College students, were recovering from a nasty bout of norovirus-caused gastroenteritis, a foodborne illness apparently contracted while eating Chipotle\u2019s \u201cresponsibly raised\u201d meats and largely organic produce.<\/p>\n

And they\u2019re not alone. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been tracking another, unrelated Chipotle food poisoning outbreak in California, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington, in which victims have been as young as one year and as old as 94. Using whole genome sequencing, CDC investigators identified the DNA fingerprint of the bacterial culprit in that outbreak as E. coli strain STEC O26, which was found in all of the sickened customers tested.<\/p>\n

Outbreaks of food poisoning have become something of a Chipotle trademark; the recent ones are the fourth and fifth this year, one of which was not disclosed to the public. A particularly worrisome aspect of the company\u2019s serial deficiencies is that there have been at least three unrelated pathogens in the outbreaks \u2013 Salmonella and E. coli bacteria and norovirus. In other words, there has been more than a single glitch; suppliers and employees have found a variety of ways to contaminate what Chipotle cavalierly sells (at premium prices) to its customers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Miller on the Faustian bargain Chipotle willingly made and is now paying for: Chipotle, the once-popular Mexican restaurant chain, is experiencing a well-deserved downward spiral. The company found it could pass off a fast-food menu stacked with high-calorie, sodium-rich options as higher quality and more nutritious because the meals were made with locally grown, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,74,66,16,13],"tags":[97,827,39,51,244],"class_list":["post-33949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-food","category-health-science","category-science","category-usa","tag-advertising","tag-genetics","tag-junkscience","tag-pr","tag-publichealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Pz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33950,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33949\/revisions\/33950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}